


Just Paul

by Slythgeek



Category: The Beatles
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 09:12:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3244184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slythgeek/pseuds/Slythgeek
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John shows up on a gray day in Scotland to show Paul his new album - and to make amends.</p>
<p>Takes place in 1971</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Paul

The fog of Paul McCartney’s breath on the window closed in, evaporating almost faster than he could breathe out again. He’d made a game of it before he even realized what he was doing. Breathe in deep, breathe out warm against the window, repeat before the cloud disappears entirely. He was supposed to be writing. He was supposed to call Moreland back at the attorney’s office. Hell, he was supposed to be Linda’s moral support right now, but all he could do was blow on a cold window and watch the sky threaten rain.

“Mister McCartney,” came a soft call accompanied by a knock at the door behind him. Paul reflexively swiped his long-cooled joint under some papers and called back, “Come in, Britta.”

His housekeeper opened the door gingerly and took a brief look over the cluttered office before spying Paul.

“Mister McCartney, wouldn’t you like me to pick up in here?” she asked.

If Paul had been honest with himself, the room looked more like a storage locker than an office, the sort of locker where things were tossed which one neither wanted to throw away nor see again.

“No,” Paul said flatly, but he followed it up with a quick, “No, thank you. Something up with Linda?”

“No, no, Mister McCartney.” Her face seemed to redden in the dim room. “It’s... It is...”

“What?”

“Well, _he_ is here.”

“Moreland?”

“Not Mister Moreland. Mister... Mister Lennon, sir!”

A jolt of understanding flashed through Paul’s fogged brain. John. No. He’d gone to New York last month. The papers, the telly, they all carried the story – moving to the States to free himself from the past. Maybe it was one of those impersonators in the puffed-up wigs. Britta hadn’t seen John in person before.

“Your certain on that?”

“Looks like him, and Linda seems a right bit anxious.”

He wanted to smile at her with that good-natured grin he used during the Beatle years to reassure everyone that the sun was up and the sky was blue. Today, though, the sun seemed unwilling to shine, let alone turn the sky a blazing blue. Paul frowned.

“Might as well see him if he’s come all this way,” Paul said, as much to encourage himself as to answer Britta.

 

 

John had not taken a seat. He patted his legs with mittened hands as if trying to keep warm. His hair had grown since the last photos Paul had seen, back to that unkempt heap of ’67 with longer side-whiskers. A flat package protruded from under his denim jacket, and Paul recognized it immediately as a record.

“Behold the man,” Paul whispered with a chuckle.

“Do what, Paul?” John said, a slight frostiness to his voice.

“Just... I’d have expected the second coming of Christ before... before you,” Paul said.

John shifted his weight and glanced at the record under his arm. He rubbed the edge of his muddy boot on the carpet. Linda watched from a doorway, arms crossed defensively. Britta stood frozen halfway down the stairs.

“Jesus, John,” Paul sighed, “you gonna take off your wellies or just keep tracking shit all over me house?”

No doubt Linda had offered him a scraper, a seat, and lord, even a tray of biscuits, but John had waited for that indication from Paul that he might be allowed to stay a while.

John smiled. “You sound like old Mimi. You should hear yourself.” He kicked the boots into a corner near the door, knocking over a pair of Paul’s in the process. “Naw, maybe you shouldn’t. Wouldn’t want you to fall in love with the sound of your own voice.”

Linda bristled visibly.

“Too late, mate. Done and done,” Paul said, clapping a hand on John’s shoulder with only the slightest hesitation. “Linda, love, would you give me old bird and me a bit of privacy?”

“Are you sure you want that?” Linda said, looking John up and down as if deciding whether Paul could still take him in a fight. _Go for the glasses first,_ she thought, but then Paul probably knew from experience.

“Sure as shake. Can’t you see he’s a ball of nerves in front of birds? I’ll see if I can’t get him up the courage to ask one of you to dance.” Paul winked.

“Britta,” Linda said, “you can clean that up later. Let’s leave the boys to it.”

John only sat when Linda was gone. He gave Paul an uncharacteristically shaky smile as Paul took a seat beside him on the sofa.

“Well, out with it,” Paul said. “Why’d you make the hop? And without Yoko, of all things?”

“Erm... I’ve done something. Something rotten.”

“You’ve done a lot of things rotten, Lennon.”

John’s smile returned. “You’re right. I’ve done you. Rotten to the core. I should know.”

They had resolved not to talk about that, even to each other, though Paul must admit he’d cheated a bit in a song or two since.

“Seen me core, have you?” Paul asked.

“Not seen it, but I’ve felt it, and it’s a dead rotten mess. You should get that looked at.”

Paul had not noticed how close John’s face had moved to his own, or perhaps he had moved closer to John. He could pick out individual redder hairs in John’s sideburns. He could follow the array of indents in John’s lips.

“So, in answer to your question...,” John said, turning away and laying the record on his lap, “I did this.”

“What?” Paul said. He shook his head to clear the fog that had once again come over him. Apparently the pot hadn’t quite left his system.

“You got a player down here?” John asked. He unwrapped the package in one movement, letting the paper slide to the floor. The cover was white with a simple “Imagine” scrawled across it in John’s writing.

“Advance copy,” he said.

“Of what?” said Paul, opening the top of his turntable to distract himself from the way John’s fingers slid the record out of its sleeve.

“Me new album.”

“I could’ve bought it in the store, you giant div, and no need for you to fly your scrawny arse over here and tromp to me house,” Paul said.

“I couldn’t let you listen alone,” John said.

“Now you do sound like a bloody bird!”

“Just spin it.” John shoved the album into Paul’s hands, B-side up.

Paul tried to turn it over, but John grabbed his wrist. “No. You gotta play this side.”

The first two songs, Paul mused, were rather incomplete. Catchy, to be sure, but raw. It wasn’t the sort of raw music that John would bring to Forthlin Road spilling out of his mind and off stacks of paper. These songs dragged through Paul’s head like emotional sandpaper. John’s frustration, John’s loneliness. The papers, the magazines, the news all made John look secure in his new life, happy without the Beatles, happy with Yoko and without Paul. But, Paul supposed, he must look happy too. He was, some days. The days when Linda took out her camera and followed him and the children out to the pastures were good days. The days when he replaced the usual cups of tea with joints and absently filled his pages with concentric circles, those were bad days.

“It’s about Yoko,” John said. 

“’Course it is,” Paul replied, willing himself not to hear the pained timbre of John’s singing voice. This was not the song of a man who had found his love and settled down with her, and Paul thought vaguely he had heard the song before...

“Nowthisone,” John muttered as the next song began. He seemed to close in on himself, sinking into the sofa, drawing away from Paul.

“Use words, John,” Paul said. 

Oh, bloody John. When John felt bad about something, he reacted one of two ways – he would become belligerent, or he would become despondent. Belligerent John, well, he had his charm, so long as you weren’t the target. Paul had always been soft for Despondent John, and John likely knew it.

“It’s a bit like ‘Glass Onion’, huh?” Paul asked, surprised to find how well his body still curled around John’s, even more surprised he had curled his body around John’s.

“’S not like that,” John said. His words came out muffled as he’d buried his face against his forearms.

“Hey, hey, John,” Paul whispered.

Linda was probably just a room or two away, and here Paul tugged John’s jacket off his shoulders so he could nudge his chin in against John’s neck. Those red hairs of John’s sideburns brushed his own unshaved cheek, and –

“It’s about me,” Paul said in a flat voice.

John’s hairs suddenly felt bristly and uncomfortable. Paul rolled to the other side of the couch.

“Jus’ listen to the rest,” John muttered.

“I’m listening.” 

_Muzak, though. MUZAK._

“John...,” Paul said quietly.

“Shhh.” John turned further away, pulling his knees to his chest.

Paul listened in silence until the final bars faded. He rose wordlessly and shut off the record player. John had folded himself up so small into the sofa that he seemed desperate to disappear between the cushions. His nose he’d tucked between his knees, and his exposed arms wrapped childishly around his legs.

“John?” Paul said, pausing beside the sofa, fearing that sitting down might tumble that little ball of John right over. 

John’s silence answered. He even seemed to be controlling his breathing so as not to make a sound. Paul knew this behavior from the girls, well Heather especially. She was at that age. John, however, was a grown man who had, it now struck Paul, sung some rather awful things about him and packaged that load of shite for the world to hear. 

“John Lennon, you giant arse!” Paul cried, plopping onto the sofa with enough force to send John flailing for balance. “You keep doing that, and I’ll get you one of Mary’s bottles.”

“You’re not angry?” John whispered.

“’Course I’m angry. I’m dead furious, but mainly that you’re like to wet yourself on my fine new cushions.”

“You hit first, you know, all Ram-a-lam on me, and don’t say it wasn’t about me,” John said, gaining the confidence to look Paul in the eye.

The singsong had returned to John’s voice, a good sign if Paul still knew his old friend.

“You think the world of yourself, don’t you, Lennon? I might have put a thing or two ‘bout you, but the rest was just the usual hit-makers, you know. What there was of you wasn’t too bad.”

John unfolded himself slowly. “We square then?” he said. 

“Not half square,” Paul said. He had tired, in the final Beatles years, of always giving in for John. John treated apologies like poison. If he offended, which he did daily, he was only kidding, or he was making things square. In New York, Paul wondered, did anyone mend the fences John trampled?

“And why not?” John said defensively. “I sat on my behind all the way to the land of Scotch eggs, and you’re not going to call that ‘square’?”

“We haven’t been square in a long time.” 

With a pounce that sent Paul’s arms into defensive position, John took Paul by the shoulders. He moved slowly toward Paul in the silence, imperceptible until his long nose touched Paul’s. Paul’s lips had not been this close to John’s since the night in 1969 when they’d attempted to stop the band hemorrhaging, both believing the Beatles to be a marriage they needed to save. Hadn’t they divorced? The ongoing court battles, George and Ringo carrying messages between them, the songs like their children? 

“Can I make us square?” John asked.

Paul never remembered a time when John offered to make amends. Certainly John would look remorseful, but when you wished he’d give you something more than doleful eyes, suddenly the problem became someone else’s. 

“No use in trying to get along, you know,” Paul replied. “Not a band anymore.”

“Don’t I know it. But we’re still a band in your head,” John said.

“I’ve been going it on my own.” 

Paul thought he could feel John’s lips against the side of his mouth as John said, “Nothing says you’ve got to.”

The lawsuits could be dropped. John could move back across the pond, and Yoko... well, she... and Linda... and... Life had become more complicated in such a short time, and really hadn’t it always gotten complicated that quickly? First they’re playing in some dingy clubs, and next they’ve got new hair, new suits, and tour dates. The doors to the Cavern closed behind them.

John’s lips touched briefly against Paul’s cheek, and Paul responded by turning his mouth to John’s. The red-gold haze of a good trip gleamed in the light from the windows as he tasted John’s skin and the wet insides of his lips. John’s hands stayed heavy around his shoulders as if to catch Paul should he die right there on the sofa.

Paul bowed his head, cutting off the kiss, and John followed his mouth madly a moment before pulling back.

“John,” Paul said, “I... we can’t be this again. We did it, you know? It was good. We were the tops. You and I... and Ringo and George too.”

“Still are. Still tip-top,” John said, confusion in his voice.

“You can be. And I can be. But not us. We’ve both got things... things to do.”

Silently, John removed the record and slipped it into its sleeve.

“This is yours. Burn it or whatever,” John said, handing it to Paul.

Paul caught him by the wrist. “No, John, no. I don’t hate you, truth. But now you’re not Teddy John, not Beatle John. You’re just John. And I am, well, just Paul." 

John’s mouth broke into a manic grin, and he turned his hand over into an awkward shake. “Nice t’ meet you, Just Paul.”

“No jokes,” Paul said.

John’s face fell serious immediately.

Paul continued, “Like you said, the only thing I did was yesterday....”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“’Course not. You know I wrote us at least a couple swimming pools. But what I’m saying is the band – the Beatles – that was yesterday. Today we’ve got other things. There can still be us in the other things, but a different us, a new us.”

“New Us of A,” John said with a sad grin. “Right. No jokes. Sorry for it.”

“You’re sorry for a lot, but I’ll take that one.”

“Well, Paul McCartney,” John said, taking his hand again, “pleased to meet you.” 

“And you too, John Lennon.”


End file.
